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President Donald Trump’s second state visit to Beijing occurs as a chastened display of the hard shell but also inner vulnerabilities of American primacy, and a symptom of crisis within the transatlantic hegemonic bloc that has dominated the world since 1945. 

Plummeting approval ratings – hovering in the low-to-mid 30s amid an unpopular, protracted and largely unsuccessful even humiliating conflict with Iran, surging energy prices, and domestic disillusionment – reveal the widening gap between the ruling class’s imperial ambitions and the consent of the governed, let alone the realities of global power. However, there is a raging fury within the halls of American power that threatens grave risks of wider conflict and warfare.

China may hold an advantage at this time in the jockeying for position in competitive world politics. The bigger, broader picture, however, is one of interlocked capitalist economies, largely benefitting tiny proportions of the populations of the world, each locked into interdependencies that are completely vulnerable to instabilities, conflicts, blockades and wars that slow or halt the flows of goods, people, money, services. 

China’s upper hand, its current tactical advantage, is short term and temporary. So Trump and Xi will need to do deals, and they will do deals, because that’s the great game today.

China needs the Hormuz Strait reopened in the medium term. It wants the US to say it “opposes” Taiwanese independence, not just that it “does not support” it. China’s economy needs feeding to keep its own people from rising up against inequalities and economic discontent. It has cards to play now but they do have to play – there is little mileage in watching and waiting.

The American foreign policy establishment, which is used to doing more or less what it wants, and despite several coercive lessons at the hands of the peoples of several countries – Vietnam, for example – is furious that it has come to this. Their fury at loss of relative position, despite their fabulous levels of concentrated wealth, is out there for all to see. It is visible in the kidnapping of a president, the strangulation of Cuba, the arming of Israeli wars, threats against Greenland, Panama, Mexico and Canada, and the disastrous, hubristic war on Iran.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

The American foreign policy establishment is trying to lay down the law of the jungle of which they have been master for decades but which is now changing. There are much bigger and more assertive beasts in that jungle now than ever before. The American dream, and........

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